I happened to catch D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” on TCM the other evening.

It’s a fantastic movie on several levels. It’s also grotesquely racist.

Taking place during the Civil War it pits white man against white man while, to its eternal shame, presenting black people (played by white people) in the most stereotypical and vile ways imaginable.

Worse, Griffith – who tried to make amends with a follow-up film “Intolerance” – was a Kentuckian who presented the KKK as the white-sheeted saviors of a post-war South, a wonder of idiocy that inspired a just-forming NAACP and caused riots in cities where it was shown.

Ranked 42 on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 list, the 1915 silent picture was the first epic (at over 3 hours) film made in America.

Contained in it is nearly the entire visual vocabulary of the movies, the close-up, tracking shots, fades, the love gained and lost, the boy meets girl, the two requisite twists of fate and a happy ending.

And it’s marvelous to look at. Lit from above by sunlight filtering trough muslin-hung ceilings, there is an almost ethereal quality to its sepia tones.

The battles choreographed by West Point officers and the assassination of Lincoln in a splendid replica of Ford’s Theater make it a time capsule populated with actors that were then as far removed from the Civil War as we are from the 1960s.

But it’s interesting to see how certain people, even then, glowed on screen. And nobody in this huge cast glowed more than star Lillian Gish and co-star Mae Marsh.

While Gish is still generally recalled, Marsh’s impact is now reserved for those few cinema fans who actually take the time to watch a stunning silent movie that somehow manages to tell its story with few dialogue cards and more gesturing than a ballet.

Marsh, who was making a whopping $2,500 a week in a day when teachers made $1,000 a year, is of special interest because she lived – until her death in 1969 at age 74 – in Hermosa Beach in a house on The Strand, bought with money she began accumulating in 1910 when she was only 15.

It was Marsh that made me sit through this long movie that, even now, looks big-budget with its elaborate sets and hundreds of real horsemen on real horses.

I had been meaning to see this actress and this film ever since I first saw her looking back at me from a silver frame in 1986, when I went to interview then-98-year-old Louis Lee Arms at a swank Torrance retirement home.

Arms, it turned out, had been for 50 years the husband of one of the world’s most famous actresses, Mae Marsh.

A tall and elegant man with a full head of white hair, he was a fantastic storyteller who complained often about the “aridity” of the retirement home conversation while knowing full well that he would still have been in his big house on The Strand that he had shared with Marsh and their three children if his vision hadn’t failed.

We would become friends over the next few years with me dropping in from time to time and him calling from time to time, once because the old Hollywood Brown Derby had burned.

As it turned out, the fire had no more effect on that terrazzo and brass sidewalk marker than the years had had on the mind and memory of Arms, who carried a vanished world inside his head.

A slight nudge and we’d be off.

“They installed Gish, Pickford, Swanson and Marsh at the same time. It was quite an event,” said Arms, who took a step down when he left a career in newspapering for the just-emerging movie business in New York City.

After a shared lifetime he was still obviously smitten with the vision of a 20-year-old actress – the co-star of D.W. Griffith’s twin, flawed masterpieces.

“It was all new, the movies, the money, the influences and that word, star,” he said. “But she was just that, a star.”

Their meeting and their unlikely marriage still seemed incredible to him nearly 20 years after her death.

After all, he was making $60 a week as Sam Goldwyn’s very first publicist and she was making the aforementioned fortune.

Shortly after this successful press junket in Jersey, he placed an item that he thought would make movie publicist history, a story that he thought would be regarded as a benchmark against which all future movie publicists would be measured.

“Goldwyn had just finished a film in 10 days, which seemed like record time to me. So I gave the story to the press. The following Monday morning I walked in acting like I was on a lucky roll, only to be fired. Goldwyn, a hard man who could barely speak English, was trying to get away from the old quickie two-reeler image and I, apparently, had blown it. He looked at me with those cold eyes of his and screamed, `People are laughing at me, laughing at me!

`You’re finished. Go, get out!”‘

Still, this fired publicist made off with the studio boss’s biggest player. By the time they moved west with the pictures in 1921, Arms had a short movie career behind him and a lot of reporting experience.

There should have been a time-created gulf separating the two newspapermen sitting across from each other in that room, but there wasn’t. The business linked us, storytelling linked us.

“I remember the day I walked into the El Paso Times with 10 cents in my pocket looking for a job,” he told me on one visit. “The conversation with the editor went like this: `You ever work as a sports editor?’ Yes sir. `You’re hired.”‘

He always came back in conversation to Mae, the young girl in “The Birth of a Nation” who flings herself from a cliff to escape Renegade Gus, a crazed white man in blackface.

“Why she chose me I don’t know. She was the biggest movie star in the world.”

But stars fade. Everything fades and palls, and what remains in the minds of life’s long-term survivors are the grand moments.

“We managed to get through it all, the child-rearing, her retirement, the stock market crash and me going into real estate. We got through it and never fell out of love,” he said just before he died at the age of 101. “I still miss her so much it hurts.”

I saw her come to life again on film and now understand.

As he spoke some of the last words I would ever hear him say, he looked across the room at that photo, the one he could no longer see, the photo of a pretty, vanished girl. “Now I’m just waiting for the day.”

Mae and Louis are buried side by side in Section 5 of the Pacific Crest Cemetery in Redondo Beach.

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